Basic surgery – The Educational ’Kit’

At the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Basic Surgical Skills are taught in small groups (36 students) on seventh semester. Five groups attend each semester.The course runs for eight days, of witch the last four are spent in the Operating Room (OR) doing surgery on live research pigs. This means that all the basic surgical skills have to be taught during the first four days. Up to now this has been done the traditional way through theoretical lectures repeated several times during the semester. This method was time consuming - eating away valuable hands-on time, and it was also rather boring for both student and teacher.

With the implementation of our new E-learning course, all eight days can now be spent on practicing the basic surgical skills, as the students are now presented with the theory on-line, before coming to class. In the beginning of the semester, before the lectures start, the students receive an e-mail with log-on information and information on what to prepare for day one. The course consists of a line of chapters concerning surgical skills and principles. The ‘chapters’ contain narrated Power Point presentations and narrated videos demonstrating a variety of procedures and skills.When the students show up in class they are now well prepared and have all the theoretical background they need to practice the skills they have watched on-line.For practicing the skills the students start off by spending two days in our new Skills Lab. Here they are able to practice under circumstances that are safe, harmless and fun, as all the procedures are performed on models – toy dogs and cats! After successfully ‘passing’ all the stations in the Skills Lab, the students then spend one day practicing surgical skills on cadavers.So during the first four days of this course, the students become sufficiently prepared to be allowed to do surgery on live research pigs.It is adamant to the department, that these pigs are utilised in a proper way. It is our duty to ensure that the students are optimally prepared and educated before being allowed to perform the surgical procedures on live animals. It seems that our ‘Educational Kit’ - On-line teaching in combination with the Skills Lab – makes this optimal preparation possible. Not only can the students go back and repeat all the basic surgical skills (both on-line and in the Skills Lab) before going to the OR, they are also presented (narrated videos and Power Points) with all the surgical procedures that they are asked to perform on the pigs.Finally, while doing surgery on the pigs, the performances of the students are filmed so that they can watch themselves on-line the following day. This not only helps them identify their own mistakes. We believe it is also mentally important for them so see and identify themselves as ‘surgeons’.

The Educational Kit in Basic Surgery (E-learning and Skills Lab) was implemented in september 2007 and the results have been very positive. First of all the performances of the students have improved markedly. They seem much more confident, they make less technical mistakes, and they manage to finish surgery on time – or even before time is up!The students’ evaluation has been extremely positive. Not only are they thrilled to have more time to practise in a safe environment, they mention in 30/01/2008particular that the on-line teaching is a great asset. The most common notes have been that it was extremely helpful to be able to:

• Prepare at their own chosen time and pace• Repeat the lectures• Watch how to perform surgical procedures instead of just looking at a drawing• Repeat the video demonstrations • Listen to the presentation with or without watching it

Finally, it’s a great help that the teaching material is there once and for all. It’s uniform and all the students have access to the same resources. They are no longer dependant on which teacher is teaching on one particular day.